Quirk

I’m trying to cultivate a few more quirks, especially in my professional life—you know, the kind of color-commentary material like the stuff that they love featuring between commercials during the Olympics. At present, my range is very limited. I am maddeningly ordinary. I don’t fetishize particular writing tools (I am pleased by Pilot G-2 pens, but I don’t run screaming from a Bic or a Foray or even, to be quaint about it, a pencil). I have worked on PCs and on Macs and, while I have my preferences, I don’t find it crippling to work on one rather than the other. I like those long, skinny reporter’s notebooks and stockpile them when I can, but I’ve managed without. By mistake, I once showed up at an interview without my bag, which meant I had to borrow supplies. I was offered a pen (fair enough) and a tiny Hello Kitty notepad (embarrassing), but I did make it through. I really like my desk (a big boomerang sort of thing, made by Herman Miller and no longer in production, unfortunately) but I’ve written on hotel credenzas, fold-down trays in trains, café tables, and in bed. I once had a boyfriend who couldn’t write unless he was wearing a necktie and a dress shirt, which I thought was really weird, because this was a long time ago, and no one I knew ever wore dress shirts, let alone neckties; it was like he was a grown-up reënacter or something. A friend of mine used to claim she couldn’t write unless she was wearing a large, and, for what it’s worth, rather hideous necklace that had belonged to her mother; another said she couldn’t write unless she was wearing her grandfather’s hunting shirt.

Whatever. I have no such fixations. I do, however, have standards. I work at home, in the country, and days will go by when, except for my husband and son and the occasional UPS man, the only sentient creatures that see me are my chickens and turkeys. I really could stay in the same ratty pajamas day and night and roll from bed to desk and back again until the pajamas fell apart. But I am somehow hung up, in my own bourgeois way, on showering and brushing my teeth and applying light makeup and dressing in reasonably attractive clothing before I sit down to write. I wouldn’t quite categorize this as a quirk, but it sometimes does give me pause; do the chickens appreciate that I’m mixing textures and color in an interesting way?

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